Most people know the feeling. There you are adjusting your underwear in an empty lift or picking your teeth in the mirror at the cashpoint machine.

Most people know the feeling. There you are adjusting your underwear in an empty lift or picking your teeth in the mirror at the cashpoint machine.

Its only halfway through or afterwards that you realise there are probably two men laughing at you in a windowless control room, having watched your every move on camera.

If you are really unlucky you will have done something so embarrassing that one morning youll bump into a neighbour who will ask if you saw the clip of yourself on a cheap reality TV show the night before.

It is now 100 years since George Orwell was born and it is eerie that someone who wrote his last novel more than 50 years ago could have predicted developments including the National Lottery and a kind of politics as part of which our leaders would tell us that to achieve peace we always need to be at war.

Ominously Orwell predicted that a day would come when we would all be constantly watched and listened to.

But for the most part we go about our lives, adjusting our underwear and picking our teeth, oblivious to the fact that we are being filmed almost all of the time.

Closed-circuit television, CCTV for short, has given us iconic moments.

We would not have seen Princess Diana arriving at the Ritz in Paris just hours before her death or Jill Dando trying to buy a cartridge for her printer unaware that she was driving home to be murdered.

We would never have seen Winona Ryder shoplifting in that terrible hat.

With cameras on every high- street, in every hospital, in car parks, banks, shops and shopping centres the CCTV industry now costs up to &#xA3;300m every year.

Paying for someone to watch over us is a booming business.

Now that we can be tracked from our doorsteps to work, down to the pub and back again, nothing is sacred.

We can never run away from home and all of our small secrets are known to someone, you might think.

CCTV gives us a glimpse of people unaware, and the question is whether surveillance like this is a faceless threat or a protective shield. Watching people without their knowledge has certainly revealed some terrible crimes.

Footage shot in hospitals showing the appalling numbers of parents who visit their children and abuse them at the same time has brought to light a crime we otherwise would not have known about.

Many parents have themselves been shocked to see secret film of their children being abused by nannies or au pairs.

But when does seeking to protect become snooping, and what rights do innocent childminders have not to be secretly filmed doing all the things that most of us would like to do in private?

CCTV is very effective in cutting certain types of crime.

There is nothing like being filmed by the police to stop someone stealing your car or breaking into your house.

Reducing easy opportunities for criminals means reducing crime.

Of course, it is really a case of crime diverted rather than crime solved as these crimes have just been pushed onto someone living in a street without CCTV.

But if the only solution to this would is CCTV everywhere all of the time, we not only need more cameras but also more people paid to watch other people.

We would have to think about who is watching us and who decides who gets to be watched.

At the moment CCTV footage shows that black people get filmed more than whites and drunks get watched more closely than men in suits.

People who dont fit in get filmed for nine minutes on the high street on average while the rest us might have to make do with only a passing glance.

And if you think that you wouldnt mind your every word being overheard, and your every move watched, you might want to think again.

You might be especially eager to raise concerns about the spread of CCTV if youre one of those people whove seen a camera and not been able to resist that rude gesture because, well, you can imagine what they do in the control rooms to people like you.